Write like a girl.

We need more silly women to take their ideas seriously.

I am writing this essay to prove that you don’t need a degree to become a successful artist. You just need to become so obsessed with what you’re doing and pursue it with your entire heart. You need to pretend that you are a little girl in her bedroom making fucking magic again.

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The world needs more silly, loud and enthusiastic women creating art.

More silly women starting their own businesses, more passionate yappers turning into writers!

I want books from the women who sit around at brunch, sharing the theories they’ve been marinating in all week and spilling their thoughts over coffee with their friends. The ones that love life, pretty things and pop culture and dive head fucking first into every little thing that fascinates them. The girl whose notes app is a graveyard of brilliant ideas she’s never taken herself seriously enough to share with others.

In truth, yappers are already writers! We just don’t see ourselves that way. Most of the time when a woman shares something BRILLIANT with me and I naturally suggest that she should turn her thoughts into something for others to read - she laughs in my face.

We might have a critical voice in our head that tells us we ‘couldn’t possibly be a writer’ because we’re too enthusiastic, too silly, too FEMININE or because we didn’t get a degree, or we’re not academic enough, or the things we want to talk about aren’t ‘serious’ enough.

But if I can do it without a degree, so can you.

You don’t need a degree, you need audacity.

The only thing standing between you and becoming a writer is your idea of what a writer should be, or what a writer looks like. You don’t see yourself as a writer and it’s blocking you. It’s stopping you from typing words out on the page, keeping your words choked up in your throat or collecting dust in your notes app because you think you’re supposed to be this serious, cynical, academic, stoic, pretentious person to be worthy of sharing your words.

I am none of those things.

I am everything!

I cackle loudly. I wear a shit tonne of pink. I am easily delighted. I shake my ass to seventies music on instagram. I am obsessed with having voluminous, delicious pink hair. And, I am a writer. I am a best-selling published author that contemplates deep, philosophical topics and excavates my life experiences for wisdom to help other people.

I just sometimes do it in a velvet blazer, or in glamorous hotel restaurants, or at home with pink candles and incense lit all around me - because I am also the author of my own fucking life and I like to have a lot of outrageous fun. I refuse to sacrifice my wild, romantic, feminine self to be taken ‘seriously’. I refuse to make the process of writing un-necessarily dull, drab or arduous just because that’s how I’ve heard other writers have described their process. Romantics are just as serious a writer as any!

You can be all of it. You can be silly and romantic and feminine and be a fucking great writer.

The moment you allow yourself to be every single wildly contradictory thing that you are - instead of what you think you should be - you snap into delicious alignment and transcend into a world of joy you didn’t even know was possible. I mean it. You become magnetic! You become unstoppable!

People will start asking you ‘what’s your secret?’!

Write how you talk.

If you’re a yapper, a deep thinker, a self-expressive woman that gesticulates frantically and gets excited about the world, niche interests or everything in life - you don’t need permission to be an artist. You don’t need a degree. You don’t need legitimacy. The way you live your life IS the fucking degree.

To be great in art you just need to practice translating those intangible, invisible swirling ideas in your mind - and fleshing them out of you into something that others can see, hear, smell, touch, read and connect with.

And you don’t need a degree to do that. You can get plenty of practice doing this in your daily life. It’s just turning thoughts into THINGS - and you do that every time you open your mouth turning your thoughts into a conversation. The reason we can get so choked up when translating our thoughts to words on the page, is because we think we need to sound different.

More serious. More academic. Less full of life.

But I write like I talk. And I love it.

I actually think I’m a better writer because I didn’t study it. I fear that if I studied how to become a writer, I might have lost my unique voice amongst the list of do’s and dont’s that get handed out to you in class. I imagine they would have told me to remove my swear words from my writing. I might have learned to write academically and formally, instead of writing like I’m talking to my best friend - the style of my writing that has become so joyful for me to create and loved by hundreds of thousands of my readers.

In fact, out of naivety, not knowing the ‘rules’ of writing helps you to bend them and create original work that stands out from the crowd. It requires no courage to break ‘rules’ you didn’t even know existed! You’re more likely to be authentic when there’s no voice in your head to fence in your self expression or rein in who you are.

When it comes to finding your ‘voice’ as an artist I believe it’s less about creating an authentic voice, and more about removing the voice in your head that you think you need to sound like.

Write how you talk.

I love to talk. Constantly. Like a fucking MOTOR. My thoughts move at lightning speed and I have an insatiable thirst for knowledge. I am excellent at communicating my ideas, not because of a degree, but because I have practiced expressing myself my entire life - in the smoking area while clutching the hands of a woman in tears, giving advice to my friends at school, in the scribbles of my notepad during school holidays, between my lunch breaks when I worked in retail and the digital diary that I have made entries into for over 6 years.

Articulation is a life skill that you can acquire in the small, every day moments - you do not need a fucking degree to become a writer.

You just need courage.

You can have all of the fancy degrees in the world. But without courage? You’re fucked.

The reason you will see people with half of your talent receive more exposure and opportunities than you is because they had the audacity to put themselves out there - even when they didn’t feel ready. They’re doing all the cringey shit you can’t be bothered to leave your comfort zone for - whether that’s self-promotion, reaching out to people in your industry or networking.

Great artists deem themselves ready even when there’s no proof.

But most of us do need to see examples of something being done by someone like us, to believe it’s possible for us too. Psychologists call this a ‘vicarious experience’. We are each walking permission slips for other people to chase their dreams! We need examples! Role models! Cheerleaders! I had my book agent give me the courage to write my first book even when I doubted myself. I had Carrie Bradshaw to prove you can be a glamorous, fashion obsessed author that romanticises the journey! And I am writing this essay to prove that you don’t need a degree to become a successful artist. You just need to become so obsessed with what you’re doing and pursue it with your entire heart. You need to pretend that you are a little girl in her bedroom making fucking magic again.

I want to be your living proof that you can be a silly woman that gets shit done!!!!

thanks Carrie!

Decide that you are a writer.

I know there are women reading this right now whose minds are constantly overspilling with theories, opinions and ideas about the world, whether they always have something interesting to bring to discussions with their friends, or their notes app is filled to the brim with brilliant ideas they swear they will one day turn into a chapter, an instagram post, a blog, or a reel. Women that are magnetic, with an innate ability to change the way their friends, their family and even strangers think about life. And yet you struggle to believe your ideas are worthy of pouring into the vessel of an essay, a blog post, or an entire book.

But they will never be worthy, until YOU decide that they are. You decide your ideas are worthy when you bring them to life and share them.

Stop comparing yourself to this ‘idea’ that you have in your head of the kind of writer or artist you think you need to be. Be a writer that fucking loves to party. A writer that loves life. A writer that wears a lot of make-up. A writer that swears like a sailor. Write like a fucking girl. Light a candle. Wear a cute outfit. Take yourself to a fancy coffee shop. Cosplay the life of a glamorous travelling writer. Do whatever silly thing you need to do to fall in love with it. Let it become your identity.

Stop waiting to be knighted by someone to tell you that you’re good enough to write or create something. If you do really need it - this is my permission slip for you to release those shitty drafts, to share your ideas and release yourself from the tension of storing ideas in your mind and body.

This is my permission slip for you to become a writer.

The world needs more silly women to take their own art seriously. Because those institutions you’re looking to for approval wont. You must force your existence into this world and demand that your vibrancy, enthusiasm, joy and ideas are important.

So go. Write. Make things. Share them. Cringe yourself out while you do it. Start every morning asking yourself ‘what is the most audacious thing I could possibly do today?’ and do it. Let it feel embarrassing as you try to write something. Let the voices in your head say ‘who does she think she is?’.

And rejoice in it. It means it’s working.

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I would love to hear from you in the comments, did this resonate with you? Have you ever struggled to take yourself seriously in something because you thought you were too feminine? Too enthusiastic?